What better way to gloat about a vacation than to send friends and family a postcard?Before the age of digital photography, smartphones and social media, sending a postcard was the equivalent of posting a vacation photo to Facebook or Instagram, minus the deluge of sepia-tone photos of people's dinner slapped with tacky vignettes.

“Certain dealers ... may have postcards of about every state in the country,” Sartell said. “You look up your state and try to find your city in that state.”

One could call the Sartells amateur “deltiologists” — those who study and collect postcards.
“They were neat,” he said. “It was neat to see the hometown you grew up in before you were born, what it was like and so on. I was very interested in it.”

But as with many collectibles, these postcards can get expensive. Some items in Sartell’s collection date back to the early 1900s and have cost him up to $30 for a single postcard.

“They were all each $10-$30 probably,” he said. “I don’t remember exactly, but I know they don’t give them away, because they know they got something that’s pretty rare. They don’t sell them for 10 cents.”

For pieces of cardboard with photos on the fronts, they don’t come cheap. But the fact that they act as a window into the past is invaluable to Sartell, and he felt compelled to share.

“I hope your readers enjoy them as much as my wife and I have,” he told The Oakland Press.